So you want to adopt from foster care

Photos by Rebecca Tredway Photography

When people tell me they are considering adoption as a way to grow their family, I encourage them to consider adopting from foster care. There are a lot of benefits to adopting from foster care. It is essentially free and there are many kids in need of loving families. You can have access to lots of information about their medical history, in many states you live with them for six months before your adoption can actually be made legal (so you know them pretty well), and there are options for both open adoptions or adoptions that are more closed (“open” and “closed” are terms that refer to how much information is shared between adoptive parents and biological parents).

There are two ways to adopt from foster care. You can either adopt a waiting child or you can invest yourself in fostering a child who is not legally free for adoption, but may become so over the course of the months or years you are involved (you need to be committed to the primary goal of reunification with the biological family until that is no longer the case goal). Neither of these options are as easy as I imagine people think they are. I sometimes get the impression people think you go to the foster child pound and pick out the one who looks cute to you, fill out some paperwork and Boom! You’re a family! The actual process is a lot more nuanced and unpredictable.

So if you’re thinking about adopting a child in foster care, let me clear up a few misconceptions:

You can adopt a baby from foster care. There are rarely ever babies that are legally free for adoption through foster care. The reasons a parent will lose parental rights of their child usually take time to present themselves. Even if a parent has had other children removed and adopted, they may get a fresh start with this child. If a parent is not able to care for their baby, those babies are usually adopted by the foster parents who were able to commit to them when adoption wasn’t a certainty.

You can’t adopt a baby from foster care. All three of my children adopted from foster care came to my home as infants (one at 10 days, one at 2 days, one at 5 months). They also all had visits with their biological parents and their future with us was uncertain for nearly a year. Minimum. If you want to have a child in your home from the earliest days, you’re going to have to be comfortable with a level of legal risk and be able to support reunification as the primary goal. If you’re okay with that, there is a chance that you could (eventually) adopt a baby through foster care.

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